Third Text, Vol.
26, Issue 6, November, 2012, 729 – 744
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1. XXIII Salón de Artistas
Nacionales 1972 –1973,
Instituto Colombiano de
Cultura, Bogotá, 1972; see
also Camilo Calderón
Schrader, ed, 50 años:
Salón Nacional de Artistas,
Colcultura, Bogotá, 1990,
pp 180 –186
2. One prominent critic,
responding to the work of
Caro and Jorge Posada,
wrote: ‘Do these young
artists have an idea of the
reality that surrounds
them, of the country that
they live in, of the cultural
circumstances that
correspond to them, of the
artistic activity that is
taking place at this
moment? It seems to me
that in the case of Caro and
Posada, their information
about what is happening in
international art does not
compensate for their
ignorance of closer and
more throbbing realities.’
Germán Rubiano
Caballero, ‘Jóvenes en
Museo Moderno’, El
Tiempo, Bogotá, 5 April
1973. All translations are
mine unless otherwise
noted.
3. The first example of such
favourable criticism came
with Caro’s artistic debut at
Art Does Not Fit Here
Colombian Conceptual Art between the
International ‘New Avant-Garde’
and Colombian Politics
Gina McDaniel Tarver
In November 1972, Antonio Caro’s contribution to Colombia’s annual
Salon of National Artists (Salón de Artistas Nacionales) – the nation’s
most prestigious art exhibition – proclaimed loudly ‘aquı́ no cabe el
arte’ (‘art does not fit here’). Caro’s crude, banner-like, text-based
artwork certainly did not fit neatly into the salon, which as usual was
dominated by fairly conventional forms of painting, sculpture, prints
and drawings displaying a high degree of technical skill. New to the
salon that year was its arrangement into four sections: political art, figura-
tive drawing, geometric art and primitivist paintings and prints.1 Caro’s
AQUINOCABEELARTE was located in the political art section, refer-
ring as it did to recent police killings of student protestors and indigenous
activists. Sharing the political art section were figurative paintings,
sculptures, prints and drawings by six other artists, mostly narrative
artworks that illustrated in a direct manner the struggle of the poor,
particularly farm workers, against exploitation. Caro’s work questioned
the place of art, even such political art, within a nation in crisis and
provided a different model for the confluence of art and politics.
From his debut in 1970 on, the obvious differences between Caro’s art
and that of most of his compatriots – its lack of technical polish, its cheap
media, and perhaps above all its reliance on text rather than image – led
some Colombian art critics to condemn it as being too concerned
with international fashion and out of touch with Colombian reality.2
Crucially, though, other influential critics and curators hailed this new
art, which they quickly labelled Conceptual, praising it precisely
because it was in step with international currents, celebrating it
as avant-garde, and giving it a prominent place within Colombia’s art
institutions.3
Caro’s text-based, anti-aesthetic, de-skilled, intentionally impover-
ished and socially engaged art defines, through those characteristics,
what is now most commonly known as Colombian Conceptual art,
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online # Third Text (2012)
http://www.tandfonline.com
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2012.734571
 730
the XXI Salón Nacional in
1970. Venezuelan critic Juan
Calzadilla, who had served
as a juror for the salon,
wrote appreciatively of his
artwork as ‘an anti-artistic
form that corresponds to
political art of our days’ and
revealed that he had wanted
to award it a prize. Juan
Calzadilla, ‘Soy espectador
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de un funeral’, El
Espectador, Bogotá, 21
October 1970. Calzadilla
compared Caro’s first
artwork to arte povera, but
by 1971 critics regularly and
consistently referred to Caro
as a Conceptual artist.
4. On Colombian Conceptual
art as having introduced new
artistic approaches to social
issues, see Ivonne Pini, ‘Arte
y polı́tica en Colombia (de
mediados de la década de
1970 a la de los ochenta)’
(‘Art and politics in
Colombia (from the mid-
seventies to the 1980s)’), in
Ensayos: Historı́a y teorı́a
del arte, 10, Bogotá, 2005,
pp 201–203.
Antonio Caro, AQUINOCABEELARTE, 1999 replica of 1972 original (lost), acrylic on posterboard, 70 x 800 cm,
collection Museum of Modern Art La Tertulia, photo: José Kattán
which introduced into the national art scene the possibility of a new artis-
tic approach for addressing social issues.4 Caro and the few other Colom-
bian artists of the early 1970s who produced Conceptual art sought, as
had Europe’s historical avant-garde, to bridge the gap between art and
life through radical new art forms.5 These artists fulfilled a double
imperative of being up-to-date with international trends while speaking
to a national audience about pressing local problems. In displaying an
art that looked international and was formally innovative (one of the
most common postwar definitions of avant-garde), they were immedi-
ately able to gain the crucial support of art institutions. At the same
time, the young Conceptualists developed their art in tune with vernacu-
lar political ideas to respond to and potentially impact on national cir-
cumstances in the art scene and beyond. Their conceptual approach to
bridging the gap between art and everyday life challenged accepted
ideas about art and its social function and, not surprisingly – in fact,
intentionally – generated various conflicting interpretations. It cleverly
and simultaneously addressed multiple (sometimes overlapping) potential
publics, international and local, ranging from art professionals
and museum audiences to university students and readers of the daily
newspapers.
It is useful and necessary to look at this art as it related to the
international art scene. While critics at the time touted it as international,
few then or since have analysed its similarities and differences in
comparison with other Conceptual art that represented the new
avant-garde at the dawn of the 1970s, in large part due to the new
 731

5. For the idea of a ‘historical ways in which it challenged artistic conventions internationally.6 While
avant-garde’ as opposed to
a postwar ‘neo-avant-
Colombian Conceptual art has certain characteristics in common with
garde’, and the well-known, mainstream Conceptual art (use of text, rejection of an aes-
identification of its thetic approach to art, institutional critique), it also challenged some of
distinguishing feature as
the desire to bridge the gap
the widely circulated ideas of what Conceptual art was all about (such
between art and life, see as denial of the importance of the visual experience and centrality of
Peter Bürger, Theory of the theory). Examining the ways in which Colombian Conceptual artists
Avant-Garde, University of
Minnesota Press,
created their work in critical dialogue with international Conceptual
art can help round out the current picture of Conceptual art, or, more
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Minneapolis, Minnesota,
1984. broadly, Conceptualism (a term advocated by certain critics like Luis
Camnitzer to avoid too close an association with the Conceptual art
6. The term ‘avant-garde’ is
difficult to pin down; its that grew out of Minimalism in New York).7 It will complement recent
meaning has shifted and studies that explain Latin American Conceptualism as distinct from
been contested since its first
use in the nineteenth
European and United States Conceptual art in its definitively political
century, and by the late profile.8 Yet this art cannot be explained solely vis-à-vis international
1960s and early 1970s, Conceptualism. To understand how it differs from Conceptualism else-
artists and critics were
challenging the formalist
where, and how (and why) it contributed something new to Conceptual-
Greenbergian definition ism, it must be seen within the political context of Colombia, an
that focused on the original environment marked by the growth of left-wing guerrilla groups and
exploration of
unconventional artistic
social protest wherein intellectuals, especially within Colombia’s
techniques and concepts, National University, were questioning their role in fostering political
attempting to recover a revolution.9
more political definition.
See Johanne Lamoureux,
‘Avant-Garde: A
Historiography of a
Critical Concept’, in
Amelia Jones, ed, A
Companion to
Contemporary Art Since
1945, Blackwell, Malden,
Massachusetts, 2006,
p 197. Nevertheless, an
examination of
international art journals of
the period reveals that the
formalist definition still
predominated. For a
contemporaneous example
of Conceptual art presented
as the latest avant-garde,
see Charles Harrison, The
British Avant Garde,
Studio International,
London, 1971.

7. Luis Camnitzer, Jane Farver

and Rachel Weiss,
‘Foreword’, in Luis
Camnitzer, Jane Farver and
Rachel Weiss, eds, Global
Conceptualism: Points of
Origin, 1950s –1980s,
Queens Museum of Art,
New York, 1999, p viii

8. See, especially, Luis

Camnitzer, Conceptualism
in Latin American Art:
Didactics of Liberation,
University of Texas,
Austin, Texas, 2007 and Bernardo Salcedo, what is it?/qué es?, 1971, book, each leaf 16 x 10 cm, published by the
Mari Carmen Ramı́rez, Centro de Arte y Comunicación, Buenos Aires, photo: Abigail Winograd
 732
‘Tactics for Thriving on
Adversity: Conceptualism
in Latin America, 1960 –
1980’, in Camnitzer, Farver
and Weiss, op cit,
pp 52 –71.
9. Aside from Miguel
González, cited below,
Colombian critics of the
1970s overlooked, or at
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least glossed over,
Colombian Conceptual
art’s relationship to
national political issues.
Only recently have art
historians (like Pini)
focused on the links
between this art and
politics. This glossing over
was the result of the focus
on internationalism and of
the still conservative
formalist approach to art
criticism in Colombia at the
time.
10. The American Biennial of
Graphic Arts had several
important international art
competitions as direct
predecessors, including the
Panamerican Graphic Arts
Exposition (1970) and
international painting and
printmaking competitions
held as part of Cali’s
annual National Art
Festival between 1963 and
1969. Miguel González,
‘Las Bienales Gráficas de
Cali’, Re-vista del arte y la
arquitectura en Colombia,
vol 2, no 6, 1981,
pp 33 –35.
11. For a developmentalist
statement of culture’s role
in national development as
made by a capitalist, see
Rodrigo Uribe Echavarrı́a,
‘Discurso de apertura’, in I
Bienal Iberoamericana de
Pintura Coltejer, Coltejer,
Medellı́n, 1968, p 5; for a
similar statement made by
Marta Traba, a
distinguished critic and
curator in Colombia in the
1960s, see, for example, a
statement from 1968
quoted in Alvaro Barrios,
Orı́genes del Arte
Conceptual en Colombia,
Alcadı́a Mayor de Bogotá,
Bogotá, 2000, p 21.
In this article, I will first analyse two works that directly address the
internationally current idea of a ‘new avant-garde’: Bernardo Salcedo’s
what is it?/qué es?, subtitled manual para la nueva vanguardia/manual
for the new vanguard, from 1971, and Jorge Posada’s Documentos sobre
la nueva vanguardia (Documents on the new vanguard), from 1972.
Through these works the artists established a critical dialogue with inter-
national art. I demonstrate how these works may be read as questioning
international and conceptual approaches to art while subtly pointing
towards politics. Then I consider two works addressing political activism
that Caro exhibited simultaneously in 1972: AQUINOCABEELARTE
and Documentación e información basada en Manuel Quintı́n Lame y
su obra (Documentation and information based on Manuel Quintı́n
Lame and his work). While the first refers textually and visually to
recent popular protests against the government, the second recovers a his-
torical figure, Manuel Quintı́n Lame, an indigenous activist lawyer earlier
in the century, and both point to the political instrumentality of the
written word. One unexplored route to understanding why Colombian
artists began to create text-based works in 1970 in their attempts to
integrate art and life is through the widely discussed and influential socio-
logical discourses of the day. Particularly illuminating with regard to the
art and life merger proposed by Colombian Conceptualists is the theory
and practice of ‘study-action’ that came out of the sociology department
of Bogotá’s National University.
MANUAL FOR THE NEW VANGUARD
When artists like Bernardo Salcedo, Jorge Posada and Antonio Caro
began to produce their new kind of art in 1970, were they merely, as
some critics believed, concerned with keeping up with international
trends, with joining the new vanguard? Salcedo’s now little-known
artwork what is it?/qué es? (1971) – commissioned for a foreign art
institution and designed for both Spanish- and English-speaking
audiences – can help us understand the nature of the relationship
between Colombian Conceptual art and the international art scene, as
it parodies and questions the idea of a new international avant-garde.
Without a doubt, there was strong incentive for Colombian artists to
participate in international art trends. To do so in the early 1970s in
Colombia was to fulfil the wishes of such nationally powerful art insti-
tutions as Bogotá’s Museum of Modern Art (opened in 1963), Medellı́n’s
Coltejer Art Biennial (established in 1968), and Cali’s American Biennial
of Graphic Arts (established in 1971).10 All three institutions were
founded (and funded) on the belief that the development of Colombian
culture through internationalisation was vital to Colombia’s development
as a modern and competitive nation, that cultural development was a
necessary complement to current attempts at economic development.
This developmentalist philosophy dominated the 1960s and continued
with some force into the 1970s, and had the support of both capitalists
and cultural leaders.11
From its very beginning, Colombian Conceptual art received staunch
institutional support, since it seemed to fulfil the demands of internation-
alism, ‘speaking’, as it were, a language that famous art world pro-

12. The jury comprised British
critic Lawrence Alloway,
who wrote at the time for
Art in America, Italian art
historian and critic Giulio
Carlo Argan, and Spanish
critic Vicente Aguilera
Cerni, who contributed to
Studio International.
13. Salcedo’s Hectárea
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appeared in Jacqueline
Barnitz, ‘Medellı́n: The
Biennale’, Arts Magazine,
vol 44, New York, summer
1970, pp 54 –55. Ideally,
internationalism was a
two-way process. The hope
was that international
biennials would promote
internationally current art
within Colombia, allowing
Colombia to become up-to-
date culturally, and also
launch Colombian artists
onto the international
stage. Unfortunately, as
happened with the earlier
American Art Biennial in
Córdoba, Argentina, this
second aspect of the
internationalist goal was
not achieved. On
internationalism in
Argentina, see Andrea
Giunta, Avant-Garde,
Internationalism, and
Politics: Argentine Art in
the Sixties, Duke University
Press, Durham, North
Carolina, and London,
2007.
14. Glusberg included
Salcedo’s Hectárea in the
Centre’s ‘Escultura, Follaje
y Ruidos’ (‘Sculpture,
Foliage and Noises’), an
outdoor exhibition held in
the Plaza Rubén Darı́o in
Buenos Aires, November
1970. Jorge Glusberg, Del
pop-art a la nueva imagen,
Ediciones de Arte
Gaglianone, Buenos Aires,
1985, pp 100, 107 –108.
15. The work has some affinity
with one produced in 1972
by Polish artist Jaroslaw
Kozlowski in an exhibition
called Metaphysics. A
photographic image of an
ordinary room was
projected on a wall with
objects in the room being
numbered. The viewer
heard a tape-recorded track
in four languages
questioning what the
733
fessionals respected and understood as cutting-edge. Ready proof came
when the international jury of the II Coltejer Art Biennial in May 1970
awarded the prize for the best artwork by a Colombian artist to Bernardo
Salcedo’s Hectárea de heno (Hectare of hay) – a huge pile of numbered
plastic bags filled with hay that is considered the first example of
Colombian Conceptual art.12 Such institutional support gave Colombian
Conceptual art a high profile nationally, despite there being very little of
it within the national art scene.
Colombia’s two international biennials resulted only in a small degree
of international exposure of Colombian Conceptual art.13 With his exhi-
bition of Hectárea at the 1970 Coltejer Biennial, Salcedo came to the
attention of Argentinian Jorge Glusberg, director of the Centre of Art
and Communication in Buenos Aires. Glusberg’s mission was to
promote ‘systems art’ (one of the many synonyms for Conceptual art at
the time) as an international phenomenon that included Latin American
artists. He invited Salcedo to exhibit with the Centre and to create a
project for it in 1971.14 The project Salcedo produced was the book
what is it?/qué es?
It is a small book, measuring sixteen centimetres by ten, and contain-
ing forty leaves. Its sparse text is in both English and Spanish and appears
on odd pages only, with most of each page left blank. Each page closely
follows the same format. There is a small banner running diagonally
across the top left corner of each printed page that reads ‘una obra afir-
mativa/an affirmative work’. Then there is another phrase that varies
from page to page. At the top, the phrase appears in Spanish, at the
bottom, in English. The bilingual text and the fact of its publication in
Buenos Aires are indications that this work was aimed specifically at an
international audience.
Only the subject of the phrase changes from page to page. Each
phrase, though it could stand on its own as a complete sentence, is pre-
ceded and followed by ellipses, that device in writing which makes
visible an absence. Each phrase answers the question ‘what is it?’ with
a negative statement, for example, ‘. . .a kiss, it is not. . .’. While some of
these statements merely seem to negate conventional forms of art –
‘. . .a drawing, it is not. . .’, ‘. . .a landscape, it is not. . .’ – others negate
what might be interpreted as more contemporary and radical forms of
art – an object, a gesture, a moment. Not all of the statements suggest
an art form; some simply describe an object, like a cow, a table, a
flower, or more complex, less tangible things, like a greeting, a friend, a
love. Still others make reference to a type of institution, like a museum
and a government. In short, the book includes a wide range of things
that ‘it’ – the new vanguard art? – is not. Is the work a reference to
the avant-garde’s dynamic of negation (ie the history of avant-garde art
movements rejecting the work of their predecessors)? Or perhaps the
work is a semiotic investigation into how we understand reality, into
the relationship between ‘reality’ and art, as famously played with by
artists like René Magritte or, more contemporaneously, Joseph Kosuth
with One and Three Chairs (1965) wherein he presents a referent
(object) and both visual and verbal references to it.15
Salcedo’s book may also be understood as a parody. Read this way, it
makes fun of the reductive tendencies of so much contemporary art, from
Minimalism to mainstream Conceptual art – the new avant-garde with
 734
viewer saw, for example:
‘Number 1. What is it? It is
a room. Is it a room?’ Tony
Godfrey, Conceptual Art,
Phaidon, London, 1998,
p 273
16. International critics of the
early 1970s frequently
discussed the reductive
tendencies of
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contemporary art; for
example, on its
‘withdrawals’, see Charles
Harrison, ‘Notes towards
Art Work’, Studio
International, vol 179,
no 919, February 1970,
pp 42 –43. Interpreted as a
parody of these tendencies,
Salcedo’s book might be
compared to John
Baldessari’s painting
Everything is Purged. . .
(1967– 1968). Kosuth’s
lengthy analysis of the
analytical condition of art,
‘Art After Philosophy’,
originally appeared in three
instalments in Studio
International, vol 178,
nos 915 –917, October,
November, December
1969, pp 134 –137,
pp 160 –161, pp 212 –213
and cited Reinhardt’s
famous dictum ‘Art is
art-as-art and everything
else is everything else’
(1963).
17. Marı́a Iovino, Bernardo
Salcedo: El universo en
caja, Biblioteca Luis Angel
Arango, Banco de la
República, Bogotá, 2001,
p 34
18. Ibid. Iovino, noting the
cinematographic qualities
of Salcedo’s work and the
influence of cinema on the
artist, wrote that what is it?
is analogous to a
humorously unresolved
suspense film.
19. Although ‘historical avant-
garde’ was not a term in use
yet in the early 1970s, the
period did see an increased
awareness and analysis of
early European avant-
garde art (especially Dada
and Russian
Constructivism) through
publications like Camilla
Gray’s The Great
Experiment: Russian Art,
1863 –1922, Abrams,
New York, 1962
which his work of the early 1970s was most consistently grouped – that
either insisted that art has nothing to do with anything external to it or
approached art as an analysis of art (Ad Reinhardt’s ‘art as art’, Joseph
Kosuth’s art as tautology).16 Salcedo’s book expresses amusement at
how such isolationism, such an inward turn of art, creates the senseless
possibility of listing what art is not (and lists were popular with Concep-
tual artists), how it opens to endless possibilities of denial. But beyond
making fun, this handbook seems to ask, if you keep eliminating, what
is left? At the very least, as Colombian curator Marı́a Iovino wrote in
the catalogue for Salcedo’s major retrospective in 2001, the continual
rejection of possible answers serves ‘finally to leave the questioning
open’.17
Given all its negation, just what is it that makes what is it? ‘an affirma-
tive work’? Perhaps it is the blank space in the centre of the page which
invites the reader to project an image of what ‘it’ might be, visually
echoing the openness of the questioning process. If one considers the
blank white surface as a screen upon which one can project, what is it?
may be seen as an interactive, constantly changing and never complete,
generative work.18 It is significant that Salcedo’s book invites the
viewer to picture what ‘it’ might be. Compare this invitation to
Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs. Kosuth’s definition may evoke various
images in the mind of the viewer – it invites visualisation, as well – yet
Kosuth’s inclusion of a specific chair and a photograph of that same
specific chair creates tension between their specificity and any image
the viewer might produce. The viewer’s own visualisation is therefore
exposed as inadequate, although, simultaneously, so is the linguistic
description. By leaving out any image, indeed, any given definition, lin-
guistic or otherwise, Salcedo leaves nothing explicit to contradict what-
ever image the viewer may generate. The individual’s creative potential
for visualisation, then, remains the most positive value of the work.
In this sense, instead of being read as making fun of the new avant-
garde, what is it? may be read as suggesting instead that the historical
avant-garde, with its declarative manifestos and claims to progress
along a path to be marked out by the artist, is a model that does not
apply, or that any new, vital avant-garde would have to be very different
from the old; would have to be open and questioning, with the partici-
pation of the viewer being crucial to the work.19 There is not only
great humour but potentially a powerful message in this unusual
manual that answers no questions, placing the onus of figuring things
out back on the reader. In short, it is not clear whether Salcedo’s book,
with its exaggerated ambiguity, was advocating or rejecting the ambigu-
ous and indeterminate qualities of the ‘new avant-garde’ in art, but ironi-
cally, despite its lack of images, it did preserve the importance of visuality
in the visual arts.20
Salcedo’s choice in creating a manual, and a pocket-sized one at that,
is key in interpreting the work. Conceptual artists elsewhere had already
proposed books as an art form, it is true, so that Salcedo’s choice could
reflect merely his engagement with the international art scene.21 But no
doubt a vanguard manual in 1971 would have had strong extra-artistic,
political connotations in Latin America, post-Cuban revolution, where
Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book was widely read and carried in the
pockets of Marxist guerrillas. Lest it seem that interpreting Salcedo’s

(subsequently revised and
republished several times,
including in 1970) and
through articles in journals
like Studio International. It
should be noted that this
recuperation of an older
avant-garde did not occur
as frequently in Spanish
publications as in English
ones.
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20. This importance of the
visual experience –
emphasised rather than
erased by blankness – is
at odds with certain
famous mainstream
definitions of Conceptual
art. For example, Kosuth
asserted ‘art’s viability is
not connected to the
presentation of visual
(or other) kinds of
experience’. Joseph
Kosuth, ‘Art after
Philosophy’, in Alexander
Alberro and Blake Stimson,
eds, Conceptual Art: A
Critical Anthology, MIT
Press, Cambridge,
Massachusetts and
London, 1999, p 168
21. The best-known examples
of books as Conceptual art
are probably Ed Ruscha’s
books, which Salcedo
could have encountered or
at least read about. An
exhibition of Ruscha’s
books is reviewed, for
example, by Timothy
Hilton, in ‘UK
Commentary: Coins,
Stamps, Books, Comics
et al.’, Studio International,
vol 181, no 930, February
1971, pp 72 –75.
22. Salcedo’s book is listed in
Lucy Lippard, Six Years:
The Dematerialization of
the Art Object from 1966 –
1972, University of
California, Berkeley,
California, 1997, p 212.
This listing is the only
published attention the
book seems to have
received.
23. Posada was eleven years
younger than Salcedo, and
in 1972, when Posada
made Documentos,
Salcedo was already a well-
known and respected artist
(and a mentor to Posada’s
close friend Antonio Caro).
Documentos may have
735
book as pointing to revolutionary politics is a stretch, consider other
works by Salcedo that, maintaining the objective, cold, straightforward
appearance of mainstream Conceptual art, point outside such artistic
practice, works such as the previously mentioned Hectárea. Hectárea
inevitably links itself to measurement of land and agricultural production;
in Colombia in 1970, ‘hectare’ was a term used frequently in pressing dis-
cussions of land distribution and agricultural reform. At the very least,
Salcedo’s art raises questions about the way that avant-garde art and
revolutionary politics – at one time such close comrades – are related
in the early 1970s.
THE NEW VANGUARD IN COLOMBIA
Not many Colombian Conceptualists received even as much international
visibility as Salcedo did – and his artwork barely registered within main-
stream international publications – but in Colombia their artwork was
regularly singled out in exhibitions and newspapers.22 The fact is that
while they adopted an international language of art, they did so mainly
to address a national audience and to treat national issues. There was a
great risk of being misunderstood but, read in the context of current
Colombian political discourse, the fit between their new artistic language
and revolutionary ideals generated in Colombia becomes clear. They
were not so much bringing a new vanguard to Colombia as creating
their own new vanguard with links both to contemporary internal politi-
cal thought and to external artistic currents.
An examination of Jorge Posada’s Documentos sobre la nueva van-
guardia, which was similar to Salcedo’s earlier book, may help further
elucidate the idea of a new vanguard in Colombia that referred to both
art and politics.23 Unfortunately, Posada’s work no longer exists, nor
do any photographs of it. Based upon a description of Documentos,
however, one can imagine how it looked. In a review of the Salon of
Young Artists held in Cali in July 1972, in which Posada’s Documentos
appeared, Colombian critic Miguel González singled out the work of
both Posada and Antonio Caro for praise. Describing Documentos as a
book made out of aluminium ‘whose content is the metal itself and
nothing else’, he applauded it as one of the most extreme works of
‘another type of vanguard’ characterised by its ‘attitude of resistance’.24
One could read Posada’s work, based upon González’s scant descrip-
tion, as a manifesto for an avant-garde of pure formalism, and an
example of contemporary reductivism, wherein the material is everything
and the work is drained of all else. The spirit of resistance of Colombian
Conceptual art is more profound than this superficial approach to art,
however, going beyond formal matters to become a different kind of
avant-garde, as González argued in his review. The problem with most
contemporary vanguard art internationally, González stated, is that it
came to rely on novelty for the sake of novelty, for its shock value, but
the public had become accustomed to scandals and began not to react
at all, seeing avant-garde works as a joke, as ‘works apparently without
meaning and totally empty’.25 González believed that the work of
Posada and Antonio Caro should be taken seriously, however, and con-
sidered for its point of reference ‘in the social and political situation of
 736
been made in homage to
Salcedo, created in
dialogue with his earlier
book.
24. Miguel González, ‘Salón de
Artistas Jóvenes’, El Paı́s,
Cali, 27 July 1972
25. Ibid
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26. Ibid
27. Ibid. González wrote that it
was installed on a small
white base and was done ‘in
considerable dimensions
whose size one may
compare to any common
manual’.
28. Camnitzer, Conceptualism
in Latin American Art, op
cit, and Ramı́rez, op cit
29. Since theory is deemed such
an important part of
Conceptual art, this lack of
theorising on the part of
Colombian artists (and
critics) is at the heart of the
argument that Conceptual
art did not exist in
Colombia during this
period. For example, see
Carmen Marı́a Jaramillo,
Colombia, años 70,
Alcaldı́a Mayor de Bogotá
and Instituto Distrital de
Cultura y Turismo, Bogotá,
2003, pp 61 –65. See
Camnitzer, Conceptualism
in Latin American Art,
op cit, pp 33 –35, wherein
he interprets the
outpouring of theory by
other Latin American
Conceptualists as reflecting
the need to explain and
clarify their radical practice
and to ensure that their
often ephemeral,
nonmaterial works
registered in the historical
record.
the country’; he saw it as ‘critical of all realities, even of the present
posture of art and the international aesthetic’.26
How is Documentos, then, related to the social and political situation
of Colombia in 1972? It may be seen, like so much of Colombian Concep-
tual art, as an ironic and highly self-reflexive work. (Being made of metal,
its pages must have been reflective to some degree, perhaps to emphasise
the need for self-reflexivity.) As González’s own praise of the work
demonstrates, critics during this period, nationally and internationally,
hyped the idea of a ‘new vanguard’, and I believe that Posada knowingly
played with this idea.
Posada’s Documentos is first and foremost clearly a refusal to put van-
guard ideals into writing. It is no revolutionary’s handbook, being too
cumbersome to be carried around for frequent consultation.27 Because
the book had no printed content, what it looked like, its form, would
have been all the more important to its reading. The pages were solid
and blank: there is no dogma inscribed in their steely surfaces. The
book was an un-manifesto, and in that way against old avant-garde
approaches. Posada’s book, like Salcedo’s, rejected and even mocked
the old model, being instead open, about dialogue, about addressing
and even creating a space for a public that would formulate and act
upon its own ideas for change. This argument is not intended to aver
that Colombian artists were unique in the international art scene of the
time; in fact, it shows their work as part of a larger Conceptualist move-
ment in Latin America that had similar goals.28 They, like other artists
during this period of unrest, felt that much ‘advanced’ art was too arro-
gant, authoritarian even in its demands on the viewer, and that the
label avant-garde, at any rate, had become more about trends and estab-
lishing international reputations – something of which Salcedo and
Posada may have willingly taken advantage, but with the aim of subtly
undermining and critiquing the situation. Unlike Conceptual artists else-
where, however, their rejection of an older model of vanguardism with its
dictatorial tendencies extended to include a resistance to theorisation,
and none of them wrote explanations or manifestos to support or prose-
lytise their art, accepting the risk of misunderstanding and the possibility
of falling outside the historical record.29
The refusal of these artists to show a clear way forward and even to
explain their art may be seen as one way of partaking in the revolutionary
culture of the day, which should be considered in analysing these works.
One of the major contributors to revolutionary ideology in Colombia was
Camilo Torres. Torres was a charismatic Catholic priest and former uni-
versity professor turned Marxist guerrilla, a forerunner of liberation
theologists. He consistently argued that the intellectual should not put
himself above the popular classes but should stand beside them, listen
to them, and assist them in communicating their own concerns. He
believed so strongly in standing beside the popular classes that he
joined the militant Marxist group the National Liberation Army (Ejército
de Liberación Nacional, ELN), refusing to take a position of leadership in
the group and instead fighting and dying as a regular soldier.
Many of the young artists to emerge in the Colombia of the early
1970s – among them Antonio Caro and Jorge Posada – studied art at
Colombia’s National University in Bogotá, the university at which
Camilo Torres taught before joining the ELN. Torres, along with the
 737

30. Antonio Caro, in

correspondence with the
author, 29 October 2005,
mentioned his relative lack
of enthusiasm for what he
learned in the art
department of the
university; in contrast, the
classes in the sociology
department fired his
interest.
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scholar Orlando Fals Borda, founded the sociology department at the uni-
versity. As a former professor, involved with and encouraging student
activism, Torres had an impact on the intellectual formation of those
emerging from the university both during and after his time there. At
the National University, he shaped the sociology department and the
approach to social sciences that it taught, and he had a broader impact
through the wide publication of his books and articles and through the
media’s accounts of his activities. Though he left the university in 1962
and was killed in 1966, his legacy at the university and beyond continued

31. The model is also known as to be powerfully felt well into the 1970s.30
participatory action
research. Orlando Fals
Torres and other members of the sociology faculty – particularly
Borda was a key Orlando Fals Borda, Juan Friede and Germán Guzmán Campos –
intellectual in spreading taught that intellectuals needed to take an active role in social transform-
this idea. For a statement
about action research,
ation, arguing for a synthesis of theory and practice. They developed a
roughly contemporary model of study-action, also known as action research, as a way in
to the art discussed in which social science might serve the struggle of the exploited urban and
this article, see Orlando
Fals Borda, ‘Reflexiones
rural classes against imperialism and the Colombian oligarchy.31 The
sobre la aplicación del way that the young Conceptual artists of the early 1970s would approach
método de Estudio- art has interesting parallels to the model of study-action.
Acción en Colombia’
(‘Reflections on the Posada and Caro, in particular, created an art that not only expressed
application of the resistance to the status quo but also encouraged members of the middle
Study-Action method in class to cooperate in the struggle against oppression, and that furthermore
Colombia’), Revista
Mexicana de Sociologı́a, experimented with new methods, all aspects that were important to the
vol 35, no 1, approach to social science being taught at the National University.
January–March 1973,
pp 49 –62.
These artists conveyed the idea that they, as artists, could not write the
formula for change, yet they hoped, even if limited by the bourgeois
32. ‘Cómo ven los jóvenes el
arte colombiano?’, El
nature of fine art, that they could contribute to revolution. In a 1973 inter-
Tiempo, Bogotá, March view, Caro stated: ‘As petit-bourgeois artists we have many defects in our
1973, press clipping from ideas and our works, but we are inclined to the revolution and close to the
the archive of Antonio
Caro
working class people.’32 In the same interview Posada acknowledged that
his work addressed ‘an intellectual, petit-bourgeois minority, that also is
33. Ibid
our ally in revolution and may co-operate with us in the long run’.33 In
34. Only in 1970 did certain Posada’s book the pages, empty sheets of metal, are more mirrors than
artists associated with
Conceptual art in the a set of records, plans or instructions, just as Salcedo’s pages are like
United States, like Hans blank screens onto which the viewer could project her/his ideas. The pos-
Haacke or Adrian Piper, sibilities for change are shown by the artist to be open, and the task of for-
begin to address such social
issues as exploitation of the mulating a plan is reflected back equally upon each viewer.
poor, racism and sexism, as
Conceptual art turned from
an ‘aesthetics of
administration’ to a THE ART OF PROTEST
‘critique of institutions’, in
the words of Benjamin H D
Many works of early Colombian Conceptual art, particularly those of
Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art
1962 –1969: From the Antonio Caro, point much more directly at the political situation in
Aesthetic of Colombia than do what is it? and Documentos para la nueva vanguardia,
Administration to the
Critique of Institutions’,
which remain extremely cryptic. A clear concern with politics – so
October, vol 55, winter notably absent from mainstream Conceptual art in its earliest years of
1990, pp 105 –143. The development – links Antonio Caro’s art to Latin American Conceptual-
Argentinian collective
work Tucumán Arde
ism.34 Antonio Caro, more than any other early Conceptual artist in
(Tucumán Burns) is Colombia, parallels the period’s revolutionary politics in his art of the
probably the most famous early 1970s. The suggestion that art should be reworked from the
example of art involved in
politics in Latin America.
grass-roots as an activity that considers and benefits ordinary people is
On Tucumán Arde, particularly evident in his work, especially in a series of posters and
 738

see Camnitzer, banners he created in 1972– 1973 that he referred to in retrospect as

Conceptualism in Latin
American Art, op cit, pp
‘pamphlet-type work’.35
60 –72. AQUINOCABEELARTE, to begin with, directed the viewers’ atten-
tion to the theme of popular protest through its text while bringing the
visual qualities and materials of popular protest into the realm of fine
art. The phrase that gives the work its title is spelled out in a loud rush
of text, with all the words run together. It is made up of large, blocky,
black capital letters, each painted on a separate standard-sized sheet of
poster board. In the 1972 National Salon, Caro hung the sixteen sheets
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closely together. The lack of spacing between words, along with the heavi-
ness and squareness of letters, makes the phrase difficult to read at first
sight. It is like a visual shout: what comes across instantly is its urgency.
The reader only absorbs the meaning of the phrase after the initial
impact of the visual onslaught is overcome. The letters are not all exactly
the same size. Their irregularity, plus the materials used (acrylic paint on
poster board), gives the work a crude, cheap, handmade appearance.
The work insistently asks the viewer to look ‘AQUI’ (‘HERE’), and
both the immediacy and ambiguity of that word are crucial. ‘Here’,
which also implies ‘now’, refers to the work’s context, but it may mean
the salon, the museum, the country. In the context of the National
Salon, the viewer’s first understanding of Caro’s AQUINOCABEELARTE
may have been as a critique of the salon. The XXIII Salon of National
Artists was in fact controversial, since it discontinued the awarding of
prizes, and many Colombian artists boycotted it. The title alone might
question whether the salon reflected the real state of art in the nation,
since it showed itself incapable of suiting the needs of artists.
But beyond questioning whether or not the salon was representative of
national art, Caro’s posters condemned recent brutal government repres-
sion against individuals who participated in public manifestations
demanding government concessions and reform. The key to this
reading is in the work’s small text, given at the bottom of each poster,
which included the names, dates of death and places where individuals
were killed during protests. Such information came from local newspa-
pers and magazines. His inclusion of the names of the government
actions in which the individuals listed were killed – ‘Operación
Control’ and ‘Masacre Febrero 26’ – ensure that the viewer has the infor-
35. ‘Antonio Caro’, Teorema, mation needed to understand the work in a wider context than that of the
7, Bogotá, October –
November 1976, p 15 salon. ‘The context of the early 1970s’, as the artist explained:
36. Correspondence with the . . . was [one] of student protests, worker problems, persecution of indigen-
author, 29 October 2005.
ous peoples; there were problems in Cali surrounding the Pan-American
According to the artist,
‘Operation Control’ was a Games (something similar to [what happened with] the Olympics in
military action against Mexico in 1968), etc.36
indigenous groups in
western Colombia who Caro’s typically biting work suggests a comparison between the civic pro-
stood up against tests that met with government violence and the protest of artists against
government policy, and the
‘Massacre of February 26’ the salon. The protest of the artists was successful (the organisers reinsti-
was the police response to tuted the prizes the following year). But, in the light of the fine print in
civic protests (or, as the
government preferred to
Caro’s work, their complaints seem unimportant. ‘Art does not fit here’
call them, ‘public is therefore a slogan calling for a revision not just of the salon but also
disturbances’) in Cali of the relationship between art and the broader context of civic protest
surrounding the Pan
American Games held there
and political violence in Colombia. In other words, Caro used an impor-
that year. tant art venue (crossing the virtual picket line created by other artists over

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37. Catalina Lozano,
‘Pancarta: Idealismo y
urgencia’, call for entries by
the Lugar a Dudas artist
space, Cali, July 2007. This
call for entries is bilingual,
and the English translation
is from the call for entries.
38. Ibid
739
art institutional issues) to stage a critique of the institutions of art as a
starting point for broader social critique. Aquı́ no cabe el arte in this
way also exemplifies Colombian Conceptual art, which relied upon its
condition as fine art and worked from within art institutions.
AQUINOCABEELARTE seems to demand a change, but of what
kind? The slogan implies that there is no room for ‘art’ in a society in
which dissent is answered with brutality. That ‘art’ in its traditional
sense – as it appears for example in the National Museum, site of the
National Salon – is inappropriate. Or, conversely, that in this context
what constitutes art must, of necessity, change. Which means that what
is now art (Caro’s art) does not fit well in the elite space of the
museum; it hangs there as an uncomfortable and discomfiting intruder.
The form that Caro used for this work, as well as its content, made the
work ‘out of place’ in the museum. Caro borrowed from the aesthetics of pol-
itical protest. Partly this means that he combined different types of visual
devices common to social protest. The work, for example, is made up of indi-
vidual letters like those held up in banners by members of a group to create a
message, a way of communicating that not only conveys their message but
also expresses it as a cooperatively generated collective. Each separate
poster that comprises Caro’s work not only has a separate letter, it has infor-
mation about the death of one individual. In this way, they are similar to a
type of poster commonly held in protests against violence, which generally
bear the name of a person who has been killed along with a photograph of
the deceased, and are usually held by a close relative or friend.
Though AQUINOCABEELARTE is made of individual posters,
Caro hung them so close together that they approximate the pancarta
or banner. Scale is an important aspect of the pancarta, since, as contem-
porary Colombian artist Catalina Lozano put it:
A pancarta is a means of expressing ideas and ideals held by a group, it
enunciates collective desires and nonconformities and it aspires to commu-
nicate, if not universally, at least to a great number of people.37
Again, the form itself communicates, even before the words of the pan-
carta can be read. This point is proved by the illegible banners, with
text barely hinted at, in depictions of social protest by earlier socially con-
cerned Colombian artists, as in Luis Angel Rengifo’s print Primero de
mayo (First of May) of 1955 and Débora Arango’s painting Huelga de
estudiantes (Student Strike) of 1957. Finally, the hand-made quality of
AQUINOCABEELARTE is meaningful as well. It indicates that the
work was created quickly in response to a particular situation (tactically),
for, as Lozano put it, ‘uttering immediate desires coming from concrete
needs’.38 So not just the look but also the reasons for and ways of
making are crucial elements of the aesthetics of protest to which Caro’s
work is related. By drawing from these visual devices, Caro’s work
calls forth vividly the broader context of social protest, bringing it into
the museum, encouraging the elite audience to consider it.
THE ART OF CRITICAL RECUPERATION
Another work that Caro created in 1972 is enmeshed with the theory of
study-action that was central to the university’s sociologists, and in
 740
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39. Caro talked about this in an
interview: ‘I made a version
of Manuel Quintı́n Lame
very closely fitted to or in
the fashion of information
art, trying to be objective,
with concise information.’
Victor Manuel Rodrı́guez,
‘Entrevista a Antonio
Caro’, Revista Valdez, 5,
Bogotá, October 2003,
p 341.
40. Caro noted how the
subject’s lack of popularity
affected the reception of
the piece, contrasting
Quintı́n Lame with Carlos
Lleras Restrepo, former
president of Colombia,
who was the subject of the
artwork Caro created in
1970 for the National
Salon: ‘Manuel Quintı́n
Lame. . . strangely went
unnoticed despite being
much more important; I
did not have the fortune of
choosing a fashionable
symbol, indigenism not
being in fashion or only in
fashion with a very small
sector, and it did not have
the same popularity as
Lleras.’ Ibid, p 344.
41. Manuel Quintı́n Lame
Chantre, En defensa de mi
raza, introduction and
notes by Gonzálo Castillo
Cárdenas, Rosca de
Investigación y Acción
Social, Bogotá, 1971
42. Fals Borda, op cit, p 55
43. Quintı́n Lame, op cit
particular with a strategy they advocated for critical recuperation of
the history of social struggle. Caro showed this work, Documentación
e información basada en Manuel Quintı́n Lame y su obra, simultaneously
with AQUINOCABEELARTE at the Independent Salon, and his choice
of presenting Manuel Quintı́n Lame at that salon is significant, as both
the work and the salon are about protest and the potential for gaining
power by using established systems.
The Independent Salon, organised as an alternative showcase for
national art that would reflect the desires of artists in response to an
artists’ boycott of the National Salon, was held at the Jorge Tadeo
Lozano University of Bogotá. Just as the Independent Salon must be
understood in relationship to the National Salon, Manuel Quinı́n Lame
can be best comprehended as complementing and contrasting with
AQUINOCABEELARTE: whereas the later work is a protest against
particular and current events, the former is about finding a constructive
way forward by looking back, of establishing continuity with past
social struggles and, in doing so, contributing to a long-term strategy
for change.
Manuel Quintı́n Lame also belongs in form and content to Caro’s
pamphleteering stage, but was not as transparently political as AQUI-
NOCABEELARTE. As its title implies, it plays on the contemporary
vogue for information in art, presenting its information as if it were
neutral fact through the use of plain and concise language.39 Yet
Manuel Quintı́n Lame introduced a historical figure who was anything
but neutral, to whom Caro would continue to pay homage in later
works. In the early twentieth century, Manuel Quintı́n Lame (1883 –
1967), a self-taught lawyer of indigenous descent, united and led indigen-
ous groups within Colombia in a movement to regain land they had lost
to inequitable government policy. Arrested more than 200 times, the
indigenous leader spent a total of eighteen years in prison.
At the time Caro created the work, Quintı́n Lame was not very well
known to the general public, although he was revered by indigenous
people and also greatly admired by leftist intellectuals.40 An activist
group of sociologists, anthropologists, economists and historians called
La Rosca (of which Orlando Fals Borda was a member) had published
Quintı́n Lame’s memoirs the previous year as part of their programme
of study-action, which included among its techniques critical recupera-
tion.41 The idea behind critical recuperation is that the political
consciousness and effectiveness of the working class base is built up
through the awareness of successful past efforts of the exploited
classes in their struggle against the oligarchy.42 With his work
on Quintı́n Lame, Caro harnessed art as a possible tool for this kind of
critical recuperation.
Caro lined one side of the exhibition hall with ten identical posters,
each of which reproduced a fragment of Quintı́n Lame’s unusual and
elaborate signature. Quintı́n Lame’s signature, and the detail of it that
Caro copied, is reproduced in La Rosca’s edition of Quintı́n Lame’s
book with the caption: ‘He always printed it as if it were a seal,
without leaving out a single detail, on all the letters, memoirs, petitions,
and even receipts that he wrote over the course of more than sixty
years.’43 The fragment showed the ‘Lame’ part of his signature, with
the mysterious and complex flourish that the indigenous leader added

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44. Once again, I am describing
a work that no longer
exists, although Caro
continues to create versions
of this work using the
signature. My description is
drawn from interviews
with Caro, in particular one
I conducted on 3 April
2001.
45. José Roca, ‘Necrological
Flora: Images from a
Political Geography of
Plants’, ReVista: Harvard
Review of Latin America,
vol 2, no 3, spring 2003,
p 33
46. It is reminiscent, for
example, of painted tomb
decorations at
Tierradentro, one of
Colombia’s most famous
pre-Colombian
archaeological sites.
Tierradentro is in the
department of Cauca in
which Quintı́n Lame was
born.
47. Roca, op cit, p 33
48. Ibid
741
to the ‘e’.44 As Colombian curator and critic José Roca explained,
‘Quintı́n Lame’s signature is a highly symbolic: a syncretism between
typical nineteenth-century calligraphy and an indigenous pictogram’.45
This part of the work comprised what Caro called the ‘visual variation’
of the work’s information. Reproduced on its own, it would not have
been obvious that it was part of a signature. Rather, it would almost
have appeared merely a decorative pattern, easily identifiable as indigen-
ous for Colombian viewers.46 Only the ‘Lam’ (due to its elaboration, the
‘e’ is not clear) would have hinted that it was something more.
Caro’s posters covered the windows of the hall, so that their blank
backs could be seen outside the window. The last poster, closest to the
entrance, also had biographical information about Quintı́n Lame and
about Caro’s art project printed on its reverse side. The text, then, was
visible to passers-by through the window, and especially visible just
before entering the exhibition space, but not visible from inside it. The
work’s ‘visual variation’ conventionally occupied the gallery space, but
the work leaked its information onto the street. In fact, it is only
outside the space of art that the meaning of the artwork becomes clear.
The project expanded further into the street in that it also consisted of
flyers that Caro handed out to people who passed by the university’s
exhibition hall. These flyers, like small versions of the final poster in
the gallery, had a fragment of Quintı́n Lame’s signature on one side
and information about the indigenous leader and about Caro’s work on
the other.
Quintı́n Lame’s signature signifies defiance. Caro uses Quintı́n Lame’s
idiosyncratic handwriting, the mark of an individual, to create a concep-
tual work infused with subjectivity. At the same time, as Roca stated,
‘This signature has a formal quality that goes beyond the individual,
signifying the presence of two communities in an uncomfortable coexis-
tence’.47 Quintı́n Lame’s signature was his most important legal tool
(as imposed by a system of European origin) in the battle to gain rights
and recognition for people the government treated as dispensable.
Quintı́n Lame chose to wage his battle from within the Colombian
legal system, using the law to defend the rights of indigenous people.
The repetition of the signature itself indicates the possibilities for
wielding power: it might signify the number of times Quintı́n Lame
used it in his legal battle with the government; or it may be to emphasise
the number of indigenous people whom he represented and who are still
out there, in need of representation and potentially powerful if united and
organised. By resurrecting Quintı́n Lame’s mark, Caro not only restores
‘a presence that the official histories have systematically obliterated’, he
also more broadly revitalises the power of an individual hand in the
struggle against an oppressive system.48 And, as Quintı́n Lame’s signature
with its unusual visual flourish suggests, it was not just as an individual
that he acted (individualism itself being a European value) but as a
member of a deep-rooted community. Quintı́n Lame used the power of
the foreign system but at the same time insistently maintained a distinct
and indigenous identity.
As usual with Caro’s work, the context of this installation was an
important part of the work. By inscribing the mark of indigenous resist-
ance in an elite social space (a private university), Caro called upon the
elite audience to consider the continued relevance of Quintı́n Lame’s
 742
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Antonio Caro, AQUINOCABEELARTE, 2006, replica of 1972 original (lost), acrylic on

posterboard, sixteen posters, 70 x 50 cm each, collection of the artist, photo: Jaime
Moncada Calixto
 743
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Antonio Caro, Homenaje a Manuel Quintı́n Lame, 1992, achiote pigment on amate paper, 62 x 86 cm, collection of Banco
de la República

cause. By late 1972, the ongoing battle for agrarian reform was heating
up. In 1973 President Misael Pastrana Borrero’s administration
would give the anti-agrarian movement strength by pushing through
new legislation granting concessions in support of large-scale mechanised
agriculture. The government furthermore encouraged the break-up of
the National Peasant Association into splinter groups, and some land-
owners began to organise assassination squads to intimidate the peasants
and weaken their movement by killing its leaders. As documented by
AQUINOCABEELARTE, it was a time in Colombia when the govern-
ment itself was increasingly using violent and repressive means against
anyone daring to organise protest, and the period in which rebel guerrilla
forces were becoming better organised in their own armed struggle for
land reform.
Caro’s work has little aesthetic pretence; it is instead pragmatic. He
has repeatedly emphasised the importance of communication in his
works of art. As an example, this work is all about getting a message
across effectively, one that encouraged deep reflection, and he chose a
format (posters and flyers) common to popular political struggle.
During the earliest phase of Conceptualist production in Colombia,
Caro and his fellow Conceptualists created many text-based works
that, despite being made up primarily of words, have an immediate and
 744
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49. On the role of the material
in Latin American
Conceptualism, see Mari
Carmen Ramı́rez,
‘Rematerialization’, in
Universalis: 23 Bienal
Internacional São Paulo,
Fundação Bienal de São
Paulo, São Paulo, 1996.
intense visual impact. In contrast to better-known mainstream Concep-
tual artists, and like those in other parts of Latin America, Conceptualists
in Colombia never denied the vital role that visuality and materiality
plays in the work of art.49 They were highly aware of the visual force
that the written text can have and the impact of materials on meaning.
Caro, in particular, drew heavily from the aesthetics of popular protest,
that is, from the look of the inexpensive posters and banners, often
created quickly, that express an urgent need and that attempt to mobilise
a particular public to meet that need. Caro, Salcedo and others also incor-
porated lessons learned from other forms of mass textual communication,
such as advertising, print journalism, and even public education, into
their textual works, with an eye to the visual power of written words in
convincing a target audience to act in a certain way, that is, with an
awareness that language is an instrument of power. On the surface,
these artists were in step with the ‘new avant-garde’, which at the time
was a largely a-political concept that was gaining recognition through
international art magazines, but they have more in common with other
artists internationally who, in various locales and in relative isolation
from one another, proposed a ‘new avant-garde’ as a form of activism,
as a way to respond, to educate, to create a community, and ultimately
to shape society. Their art may be understood best not in terms of inter-
national fashion but in the context of Conceptualism in Latin America,
with its involvement in Marxist thought and, more specifically, in light
of the model of study-action generated and put into practice within
Colombia.
I presented an earlier version of this paper at the symposium ‘Latin America: The Last
Avant-Garde’, co-sponsored by the Department of Art History, City University of
New York, and the Department of the History of Art, Yale University, New York
City, 4 – 5 April 2008. I thank the organisers, Irene Small and Daniel Quiles, and
also extend my gratitude to friends and colleagues who commented on this version:
Edith Wolfe, Ana Marı́a Reyes, Erina Duganne, Luis Camnitzer and Erin Aldana.